tryan said:
We agree. But I wasn't talking about high school math ... I was refering to the differential equations, numerical analysis, fourier transforms ...ect. Haven't touch that stuff since I left.
I agree that advanced math won't help you to balance your checkbook.
But college in general, and advanced math in particular, are tremendously useful in developing critical thinking. Math is a big help in learning how the world works and to avoid being fooled by those exploiting chaos & coincidence as cause & effect. College liberal arts-- especially English, econ, & history courses-- can't be properly taught at the high school level (no one would pay the teachers for their specialized knowledge) but are essential to understanding propaganda techniques & marketing manipulation. Liberal-arts graduates consistently led the Navy's Nuclear Power School classes in the 1970s & 1980s, much to ADM Rickover's frustration.
On this board, numerical & statistical analysis show that some of us are much better at remembering negative college experiences (instead of the positive ones) or Bill Gates' "education" and in extrapolating them to arrive at the wrong conclusion. We all know that things don't always turn out the way we expect them to, but how many of us can explain the mathematical basis behind that observation? It gives you an appreciation of when things are more likely to go wrong.
Differential equations gave me a huge appreciation of how non-linear systems really are-- output is rarely directly proportional to input across the entire spectrum. The application of advanced math in the nuclear industry is pretty straightforward, but I also needed a working knowledge of Fourier transforms to be able to understand when a sonar system was working correctly or just being fooled by its sampling techniques. It's one thing to say "I've seen this before and the system is screwed up" and quite another to say "It can't cope with this particular situation because of the way it implements the math".
Was it painful? Sure, especially when I had to combine the math with electrical engineering & signal processing. But it can help with career & financial decisions as well. I finally bailed after my first semester of engineering mathematics but my spouse went back for a second helping of that plus another year of advanced computer-modeling techniques. For her it paid off when she had to face down a bunch of very unhappy senior officers who had to spend a bunch of money battening down the hatches for Western Pacific typhoons. They were able to point at forecasts that said they'd be OK. She was able to point out the deficiencies in the models and why typhoons don't care about math. The typhoon turned out to be right.
We wouldn't have been able to have this board's discussions on the differences between FIRECalc & Monte Carlo simulations without a good understanding of statistics. Heck, you can even use statistics to understand why Murphy's Law is so popular and why the other line always moves faster.
Finally, here's the most critical reason to have a solid understanding of advanced math: being able to help my kid with her homework. Thanks to six years of Kumon she's already finished her algebra curriculum and, at the age of 12, is working at the 11th-grade level. At an age where most of her peers are whining "Math is haaaaard!" she's acing the tests, and I can use that experience to keep her motivated to plug away at science too.
